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A STUDY OF HIS PAINTINGS 


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BU eRe pRe RGR SA bet iER: 
A STUDY OF HIS PAINTINGS 


HUNTERS IN THE SNOW (DETAIL) 


PIETER BRUEGEL 
THE ELDER 


A STUDY OF HIS PAINTINGS 


BY 


VIRGIL BARKER 


NEW YORK 
THE ARTS PUBLISHING GORPORATION 
1926 


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fRINTED IN 


COPYRIGHT, 1926 
ARTS PUBLISHING CORPORATION 


NOTE 


OsT of the material included in this book was originally published in a special Bruegel 
edition of THE Arts. Mr. Barker’s essay met with such immediate success that in 
order to meet the demand the editor decided to increase the number of illustrations 

and publish Mr. Barker’s noteworthy essay in permanent form. 


Comparatively little has been written in English on Pieter Bruegel the Elder, nothing in 
fact except a few passing magazine articles. At the request of the artists [THE ARTS undertook 
to supply this want. In selecting Mr. Barker to carry out this important work THE ARTS 
was particularly fortunate. Besides being an ardent student of the genius of Bruegel, the 
author, in the course of his duties as European correspondent of THE ARTS, was able to carry 
on the special research necessary to give permanent value to the following essay. 


ForBES WATSON. 


THE CONVERSION OF SAINT PAUL (DETAIL) 


RID TERS BRUEGELATHE ELDER 
A STUDY OF HIS PAINTINGS 


frequently dated prints, drawings and 

paintings, few things are certainly 
known about the life and personality of Pieter 
Bruegel the Elder. Almost all of these, such 
as they are, occur in a brief passage concern- 
ing him, written about thirty years after his 
death, in “The Book of the Painters” by 
Carel Van Mander. Herein is no mention 
of the date of Bruegel’s birth; even the place 
of it, despite a seeming definiteness, remains 
in some obscurity. His biographer says that 
the painter was born “‘not far from Breda, in 
a village called Breughel,* by which name 
he called himself and left it to his descend- 
ants.” The village of that name nearest to 
Breda is twenty-five miles away; and as dis- 
tances went in the sixteenth century, this 
seems hardly to be bridged by Van Mander’s 
easy phrase. As for the year, the guesses of 
the scholars range all the way from 1510 to 
1530, the most widely accepted one being 
1525. Any closer determination of it is a 
matter of comparative unimportance in its 
possible effect on the period of actual produc- 
tiveness, since this is very satisfactorily coy- 
ered by trustworthy dates. 

And whatever the exact year may have 
been, it had not been long before when for 
Europeans the geographical world had been 
suddenly enlarged as a sort of materializa- 
tion of the immediately preceding enlarge- 
ment of mind. The succession of discoveries 
—of America; of India and the true Indies; 
of Sumatra, Java and Borneo; and, two hun- 
dred and fifty years after Marco Polo, of 
China—were only the working on another 
plane of the essentially exploring spirit which 
had been previously manifested by the schol- 
ars, scientists and artists of the Early Renais- 
sance. National unity on a fresh basis had 


A SIDE from the evidence of the signed and 


* There are several different ways of spelling this name, each 
having some degree of authority; but so far as concerns the 
painter himself, the deciding fact is that the signatures now 
visible on the paintings (about twenty in number) consistently 
adhere to BRVEGEL. 


been realized in Spain through the expulsion 
of the Moors, and in both France and Eng- 
land under absolute monarchies which were 
headed, at the time of Bruegel’s birth, by 
Francis I and Henry VIII. About that time, 
also, Magellan was circumnavigating the 
globe and Cortez was conquering Mexico; 
Leonardo and Raphael were dying, and 
shortly after them went Carpaccio, Leo X 
and Signorelli. Martin Luther, preaching 
the Reformation in Germany, was thus initi- 
ating a movement of ruinous significance for 
Bruegel’s homeland; for there the cause of 
religious liberty, gradually coalescing with 
that of political independence, was to meet 
with the terrible repressions begun by the 
newly elected Emperor, Charles Quint, who 
was already by inheritance lord of the Low 
Countries. 

During all this period of ferment and re- 
orientation for the European mind, Antwerp, 
where Bruegel was to spend most of his life, 
was one of the most important of all ports. 
Situated in what was then the most densely 
populated region of Europe, it had in its 
own houses a hundred thousand persons; and 
of these more than a tenth were foreigners— 
German merchants, Italian scholars, Portu- 
guese Jews, French Huguenots, English sail- 
ors and the soldiers of Spain. Far-journeyed 
vessels brought to it the spices and rich 
stuffs, the metal-work and strange animals of 
distant lands; and their seamen had tales to 
tell of things far off towards the expanding 
horizons of the world. In this comfortable 
and prosperous city, where the sharp demar- 
cations between classes prevalent in other 
countries were blurred almost into a real 
democracy of the bourgeois, every fresh dis- 
covery and important event had its repercus- 
sion in the general consciousness. 

Antwerp was thus a natural center of activ- 
ity for the religious propaganda and disputa- 
tion which formed so large and so tragic an 


element in the life of the sixteenth century; 
creeds of all sorts readily found adherents 
among its varied and impressionable popu- 
lace. Lutheranism was so strongly advo- 
cated by the convent of Augustinian monks 
that its inmates were dispersed, after the exe- 
cution of two among them, and its buildings 
razed. Though the terrorism of the Inquis- 


Even the anarchy of Anabaptism, persecuted 
by Catholic and Protestant alike, made head- 
way through the martyrdom of its believers; 
and from 1544, almost the very year when 
the young Pieter Bruegel commenced his ap- 
prenticeship, the new sectarianism of Calvin 
entered the city and grew rapidly in strength. 

While he was growing up, the English and 


BIG FISH EAT LITTLE ONES (DRAWING). 1556. 


itor Van der Hulst and his priestly succes- 
sors imposed silence on many, there were 
open preachings as well as clandestine meet- 
ings, and riots in which religion-frenzied 
women were among the boldest; and with 
all the burnings of the books, with all the 
imprisonments and the brandings, the full 
penalties of the imperial edicts could hardly 
be enforced by those who were conscious that 
such enforcement would destroy the principal 
source of the Emperor’s precarious revenue. 


VIENNA, ALBERTINA 


the French were subduing the North Ameri- 
can continent and in the Andes Pizarro was 
rifling the wealth of Peru; Rome was being 
pillaged by the Germans; Henry VIII was 
finally repudiating Catholicism and Ig- 
natius of Loyola was in a way belatedly re- 
plying to Luther by organizing the Society of 
Jesuits; Hampton Court Palace, the French 
chateaux and the palaces of Venice were be- 
ing built; Erasmus, Direr, Machiavelli, 
Luini, Ariosto, Correggio died. As yet un- 


conscious of such events and such personages, 
perhaps ignorant of the nearer deaths of 
Quentin Matsys and Lucas van Leyden, the 
youth of nameless family was living a peasant 
among peasants—and a genius in the making 
—sharing to full their laborious, roistering 
life. ard drinkers and heavy eaters, they 
were much given to feasts and fairs; marri- 


ness, he came to Antwerp and, a youth ap- 
proaching his twentieth year, became an ap- 
prentice to the celebrated Pieter Coeck. 
Paracelsus, Copernicus and Holbein had just 
died; Bruegel had hardly learned to grind his 
colors when French Francis and English 
Henry followed them, even as their sometime 
enemy, sometime ally, Charles, was bloodily 


THE LAST JUDGMENT (DRAWING). 1558. 


ages, baptisms, even deaths were for them 
occasions for celebrations as excessive as the 
labor from which they thus escaped. Their 
animal frankness and coarse gaiety blew like 
a gale of rude health over all their activities. 
From life itself, from the small events in a 
remote village of the Campine, Bruegel ab- 
sorbed the great sane grossness which now 
seems buried in the books of his day. Bring- 
ing with him the peasant vitality which was 
to develop into a lofty philosophic humane- 


VIENNA, ALBERTINA 


but only temporarily settling religious ques- 
tions at Mihlberg. 

From his first master Bruegel must have 
received somewhat more than a merely tech- 
nical training, good as that probably was. 
Coeck had been for four years the pupil of 
Bernard van Orley and had later studied in 
Rome; in his own work afterwards he relied 
to such an extent upon the formulas then 
worked out that all of it now seems bor- 
rowed; but the precepts that he would pass 


on to an apprentice could not dull or conven- 
tionalize so forceful a nature as Bruegel’s. 
Of more significance in the development of 
such a nature must have been the stories of 
far countries that were told, adding to his 
knowledge and stimulating his imagination; 
for Coeck had spent the year of 1533 in the 
Constantinople of Suleiman the Magnificent 
and had been one of the entourage of 
Charles on his expedition to Tunis in 1538. 
Painter to the Emperor and Dean of the 
Guild of Saint Luke, Pieter Coeck died in 
1550. Then or before Bruegel passed over 
to the work-shop of Jerome Cock, who was 
not so much a painter as a dealer in pictures 
and a publisher of popular prints. His 
establishment ‘“‘was certainly the rendezvous 


A VILLAGE WEDDING. 


of all the artists and all the amateurs of Ant- 
werp and even from abroad. Rendered in 
engraving, the greater number of existing 
masterpieces would pass under the eyes of the 
attentive Bruegel.”’ (Bernard: p. 58.) The 
very shop-name, “At the Sign of the Four 
Winds,” symbolized the range of influences 
that played over him, the sights and tales that 
passed into his consciousness; and for Brue- 
gel these things could be only so many more 
incitements to journey into the world and 
see it all for himself. 


> Therefore it is not surprising that, after 


10 


he had completed his apprenticeship and been 
received into the painter’s guild, in 1551, he 
should set out upon his travels. Such a trip 
in those days was no light undertaking. All 


PHILADELPHIA, JOHNSON COLLECTION 


frontiers were insecure 
since the wars between 
Charles and Francis for 


continental domination; for 
little or nothing soldiers 
turned into robbers. Van 
Mander mentions neither 
routes nor places, writing 
only that Bruegel ‘‘went in- 
to France and from there 
into Italy.” Even the draw- 
ings now preserved afford 
no positive information as 
to the way he went—a cir- 
cumstance which might be 
interpreted to mean that al- 
ready he was interested less 
in telling what a_ specific 
place looked like than in 
rendering the emotional ef- 
fect of nature upon himself. 
But two designs now pre- 
served as etchings are sign- 
ed and dated at Rome in 
1553, and there is a draw- 
ing of the Ripa Grande 
which appears to have been 
done on the spot. The print 
of a naval battle engraved 
by Huys and published by 
Cock after Bruegel’s return 
to Antwerp indicates that 
Neswent as far south as 
Messina. 

When he passed through France, Francois 
Clouet and Germain Pilon were practising 
their art of tepid grace; when he reached 
Rome, the Sistine Chapel paintings had been 
completed, but not the church of Saint Peter. 
At the height of their working powers were 
Michel Angelo, Titian, Palestrina, Palladio; 
and Benvenuto Cellini was doubling in the 
roles of artist and bandit. There is no proof 
that Bruegel had any contact with these men; 
that he even saw their works is recorded 
neither in words nor in the paintings by 
which he lives today in their company. It 
is certainly reasonable, however, to suppose 
that the fame of his contemporaries had not 


11 


DANCING PEASANT. THE HAGUE, VAN VALKENBURG COLLECTION 


only reached him but actually played a part 
in persuading him to his long wayfaring. 
Though still in his twenties, he even then had 
suficiently a mind of his own to avoid the 
mistake of his predecessors, who had gone 
south specifically to copy and imitate the 
styles of the Italian painters. In their jour- 
neying they were following a fashion, doing 
something because others were doing it; 
Bruegel’s urge was both deeper and broader, 
as his genius was. 

Yes, the artistic, the professional, motive 
must have had much to do with sending him 
to Italy, but the only way of expressing the 
sum total of the desires that undoubtedly 


animated him is to say that he must have 
craved more life. 


“For to admire an’ for to see, 
For to be’old this world so wide’”— 


nv motive less comprehensive than this could 
have moved him. He was a great artist in 
the making, but he was even more a man than 
an artist; for him the art of other men could 


ap 


Peter the end of 1553, not long after 
the deaths of Rabelais and Lucas Cran- 
ach, Bruegel was back in Antwerp. He 
again became affliated with the shop of Je- 
rome Cock, but now as a sort of collaborator, 
making drawings for many plates to be en- 
graved by others and published by the shop. 
As a successful business man with an eye to 


STUDY FOR A “BATTLE BETWEEN FAT AND LEAN.” 


1558? 


COPENHAGEN, 


ROYAL COLLECTION 


be only a part, and not the most important 
part, of the all-inclusive experience of which 
he was in search. Only such a conception of 
his personality can account for the failure of 
the Italian masterpieces to influence him then 
or thereafter and his own immediate and life- 
long preoccupation with the entire range of 
nature and of human life. Moreover, so 
much can be inferred from Van Mander’s 
only other reference to this momentous trip, 
a reference which takes the form of reporting 
somebody else’s remark that “... in the Alps 
he swallowed all the rocks and mountains, to 
return home and vomit them out on painting- 
board and canvas. . * 


the market, Cock’s specialties were land- 
scapes of all types and grotesqueries in the 
manner of Jerome Bosch, dead thirty-five 
years before, whose works were a mine of 
motives for exploitation. The former ap- 
prentice proved to be an even greater source 
of revenue and popularity for ‘““The Four 
Winds”; he shared completely in the contem- 
porary taste served by the shop and for sey- 
eral years devoted himself entirely to new 
and increasingly inventive compositions in 
each genre. 

The pure landscapes of this period fall 
into two very distinct divisions—the small, 
intimate ones and the large, composite ones. 


» 7 


WOdsSOW ‘VNNGIA ‘6$ST “LNAI GNV IVAINUVO NAAMLAG ATLLLVA 


BATTLE BETWEEN: CARNIVAE AND LENT: (DETAIL) 


THE DESCENT OF CHRIST INTO LIMBO (DRAWING). 


Among the first sort those of such obviously 
picturesque things as ruins are less interesting, 
seem less realized, than those depicting the 
homely commonplaces characteristic of the 
Low Countries. An indefinite and puddled 
village street, a church set among trees, the 
hybrid ruralness where town and country 
meet—the buildings and small figures ren- 
dered in a clean, unwavering line and the 
massed multitude of leaves given without a 
superfluous or unmeaning  scribble—these 
things, conveyed with such immediacy by the 
free and sensitive pen-work, become sharp- 
edged and lose their bloom through the inter- 
position of the engraver’s hand. Though his 
return gave him to see all the littlenesses 
about him with the freshness of a first en- 
counter, it did not make him forget the 
mountains which had struck so deeply into 
his mind; and he composed a whole series of 


Ie) 


1561? VIENNA, ALBERTINA 

large, Latin-titled designs in which the far 
and low horizons of home were fabulously 
combined with Alpine steeps. In these plates, 
deeper than the romanticism of their com- 
posite character, is an immense and sober 
poetry which transpires even through the 
hardness of the engraving. 

One print, dated the very year of his re- 
turn, a composition of many people skating 
just outside a city wall, is obviously based on 
direct observation and is Bruegel’s first essay 
in the realistic rendering of the life of crowds 
which was later to play so large a part in his 
painting; but yet awhile the greater part of 
his labor went into a long succession of drol- 
leries and diabolisms. 

It is in connection with this part, and this 
part only, of his life-work that there arises 
any necessity of discussing the influence of 
another painter on Bruegel. Wan Mander 


WOdsSOW HOIMGaINA YASIVH ‘NITHAA “6SST “SHUTAOUd HSINATA 


1 oo 


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VIENNA, MUSEUM 


1560. 


GAMES. 


CHILDREN’S 


treats the matter thus: “He practised much 
in the manner of Jerome Bosch and used to 
make many such goblin pictures and drol- 
leries, for which he was called by many Pieter 
the Droll.”’ The biographer here recorded 
the general contemporary estimate which, 
though it is now seen to fall far short of the 
truth, was surely natural enough, since in his 
own day Bruegel was popularly known by the 
widely circulated prints rather than by the 
unreproduced paintings. The Big and Little 
Fish of 1556 is directly from Bosch, and that 
his spirit and his manner did have an influence 
upon Bruegel is not to be denied. But such 
influence as Bosch did exert upon the man 
who had returned from Italy uninfluenced 
was possible only because they shared in a 
racial streak which can be traced back of 
them into the Middle Ages. ‘The quality 
that allowed Bruegel to be influenced by 


THE FALL 


OF THE REBEL ANGELS. 


18 


Bosch at all would have manifested itself in 
Bruegel’s art even if Bosch had never lived. 
Moreover, Bosch’s art was limited almost to 
this one type of subject-matter, whereas 
Bruegel’s art soon developed other and far 
more important characteristics which over- 
shadowed without obliterating this element of 
grotesquerie. 

For the time being, however, it had free 
rein in a series of Vices and numerous sep- 
arate plates such as The Ass at School, The 
Sorcerer, The Merchant Robbed by Mon- 
keys. In these prints there are, in addition, 
a mastery of design, an inventiveness of de- 
tail and a convincingness of outlandish imagi- 
nation that far surpass Bosch’s most ambi- 
tious efforts. A little of these qualities is to 
be discerned in the two drawings of The Last 
Judgment and Christ in Limbo; and they also 
display Bruegel’s entire lack of any mystical 


1562. 


BATTLE BETWEEN THE ISRAELITES AND THE PHILISTINES. 


fervor, which would have imparted some sort 
of impressiveness to his Christs. This nega- 
tive trait in Bruegel, which is the exact ob- 
verse of the sort of humaneness which made 
him great, is further shown in the series of 
Virtues, also of this period; although these 
occasionally exhibit a high degree of skill in 
handling complex groupings, they are what 
professionalized virtues are apt to be— 
tedious. 

Midway in this prosperous and fertile time 
of development the Emperor Charles, taken 
with the notion of enjoying all the benefits of 
being dead while yet alive, partitioned the 
empire between his brother and his son, and 
himself retired in state to a monastery in 
Spain. From this haven, free of govern- 
mental responsibilities, he was able, through 
his dutiful son Philip, to instigate increas- 
ingly severe measures of religious and politi- 
cal repression for the people of the northern 
lowlands. Yet such things did not affect the 
personal liberty of Bruegel, who was main- 
taining an irregular establishment described 


19 


1562 OR 1563. VIENNA, MUSEUM 


by Van Mander in the following anecdote: 
“As long as he lived in Antwerp, he kept 
house with a servant-girl, whom he might 
have married had it not misfortuned him that 
she was always telling lies, a thing repugnant 
to his love of truth. He made an agreement 
or contract with her that he should mark all 
her lies on a stick—and he took a pretty long 
one—and when the stick should be full of 
marks the marriage should be off; which then 
happened before much time had passed.” 
More important is what Van Mander tells 
us of a friendship: ‘“He worked much for a 
merchant named Hans Frankert, an admir- 
able and excellent man, who found pleasure 
in knowing Bruegel and was with him whole 
days at a time. With this man Frankert, 
Bruegel often went among the peasants, to 
fairs and marriages, both dressed like peas- 
ants; and they took presents like the others, 
just as if they belonged to the family or ac- 
quaintance of the bride or the bridegroom. 
Here Bruegel found his pleasure in observing 
the manners of the peasants in eating, drink- 


HEAD OF AN OLD PEASANT WOMAN. 
ALTE PINAKOTHEK 


ing, dancing, jumping, loving and other fun- 
making; which things he then very skilfully 
and carefully rendered again in colors, in 
water-color as well as in oil, in both which 
mediums he was extraordinarily talented.” 
Then Van Mander proceeds to stress the 
faithfulness and accuracy of Bruegel’s peas- 
ant pictures in the details of costumes and 
movements. In short, Bruegel had begun to 
paint. 

The earliest dated painting, Twelve Flem- 
ish Proverbs, is interesting only because of its 
connection with Bruegel; its relative clumsi- 
ness of execution and utterly unpictorial con- 
ception as a whole render it very likely the 
first of his attempts in a new medium. How- 
ever, this picture and the others that must be 


1564? 


grouped immediately with 
it mark the definite emer- 


gence of what was 
thenceforward to be _ his 
predominant interest—the 


life of the peasants, @be- 
tween whom and himself 
there existed the unbreak- 
able bonds of a common 
origin and a common 
destiny. Thus he began 
at once to paint in accord- 
ance with the dictates of his 
essentially realistic genius, 
but the first works of capi- 
tal importance still retain 
a large admixture of the 
fantastic spirit which had 
been running riot in his 
recent designs for the en- 
gravings. These two pic- 
tures are the Carnival and 
Lent and the Flemish 
Proverbs in Berlin, both 
of the year 1559; in both 
fantasy is made convincing 
through realistic treatment, 
just as the Van Eycks and 
Roger. Van der Weyden 
had made convincing their 
religious idealism, Brue- 
gel’s difference from them 
being simply a difference of subject-mat- 
ter. and a still greater ‘reliancemmunan 
realistic skill for its own sake. In the Chil- 
dren’s Games of the next year there occurs 
the first complete union on a great scale of 
realism in both matter and manner; and two 
years later, with the Fall of the Rebel 
Angels, a recurrence in greatly intensified 
form of the combination between fantastic 
idea and realistic treatment. This last paint- 
ing, credited to Jerome Bosch himself until 
the discovery of Bruegel’s signature, is infin- 
itely superior in conception and execution to 
anything by the earlier man, and would alone 
rank its creator as a great painterssyemuw 
greatness it confers upon its maker is not the 
kind that is most truly Bruegel’s. Through 


MUNICH, 


“DULLE GRIET.” 


all these paintings of the Antwerp period 
there runs a rapidly increasing technical skill 
—in drawing, color and design—until the 
last picture that could possibly have been 
done before his removal to Brussels, the 
Israelites and Philistines, is for minute work- 
manship a world’s wonder. On a small panel 
about thirteen by twenty-two inches Bruegel 
has put several hundred human beings, the 
largest of whom is less than two and one- 
half inches, in a landscape setting of great 
beauty, all done in such detail that one can 
count the spots on the girattes far away 
across the river—and all seen with so careful 
a regard for values and design that it is a 
satisfactory picture from whatever distance it 
is regarded, its details merging into the 
larger relations as one views it from further 
off. Craftsmanship of this type in painting 
can go no farther. 


1564. ANTWERP, VAN DEN BERGH COLLECTION 


ay, 


TH cause of his leaving Antwerp was his 
marriage, which took place in 1563. His 
choice had fallen upon the daughter of his 
first master, Pieter Coeck. Twice during his 
brief notice on Bruegel, Van Mander refers 
to the fact that “he had, while she was still 
small, often carried her in his arms.” Her 
mother, after the father’s death, had re- 
moved to Brussels and there successfully en- 
gaged in her own profession of miniature 
painting; in consenting to the marriage she 
“stipulated that Bruegel should leave Ant- 
werp and settle down in Brussels, in order 
that he might ettace former love-aftairs from 
his eyes and his mind.” In this marriage was 
the beginning of what has been well called 
the Bruegel dynasty. The two sons produced 
copies and variations of their father’s paint- 
ings in such abundance that it is an excep- 


WoasnwW ‘VNNGIA 


“SOST 


‘ldaqVd AO YAMOL AHL 


WOdsaAW ‘VNNAIA ‘49ST “SSONO AHL JO ONIAYAVO AHL 


THE CARRYING OF THE CROSS (DETAIL) 


THE CARRYING OF THE CROSS (DETAIL) 


LONDON, NATIONAL GALLERY 


1564. 


THE ADORATION OF THE KINGS. 


tional picture gallery in Europe which does 
not boast its “Breughel le Vieux’; and these 
sons in their turn fathered a dozen more 
painters. 

But of them all, none approached the 
greatness of their original, whose six years of 
married life were filled by the creation of 


great series of five paintings, the Months. 

While he was achieving all this ordered 
beauty of art, the disorders of the life around 
him were increasing at a fatally rapid pace. 
In Ghent a mob sacked the Abbey of Saint 
Peter and, made drunk by the wine of its 
cellars and the intoxication of destructiveness, 


THE MISANTHROPE. 


1565. 


masterpieces—of realistic observation in the 
Wedding Feast and the Peasant Dance; of 
sheer imagination in the Dulle Griet and the 
Triumph of Death; of narrative power in 
the Massacre of the Innocents; of the purest 
pictorialism in the Conversion of Paul; of 
the indescribable Carrying of the Cross; of 
realism, imagination, emotion and thought 
merged into the large harmonies of that 


NAPLES, NATIONAL MUSEUM 


af 


ran smashingly at large through the city. In 
Antwerp another mob totally destroyed the 
rich and famous church of Notre Dame. 
Conflicts multiplied between Catholics and 
Protestants, between civilians and soldiers; 
bands of foreign mercenaries coursed through 
the country and open towns. ‘The Duke of 
Alva’s execution fires cast lurid lights upon 
the ruin and decimation of what had once 


been the most prosperous region of Europe. 

Of Bruegel’s own reactions to all this his 
biographer, writing at a time when it was 
almost a well-forgotten nightmare, makes no 
mention. Van Mander’s single sentence of 
direct characterization is this: “He was a 
very quiet and skilful man, who spoke little 


THE PROVERB OF THE BIRD-NESTER. 1564-65? VIENNA, MUSEUM 


but was sociable in society, and loved to 
frighten his companions, often also his own 
pupils, with all kinds of goblin noises. . . .”’ 
This does little to round out the portrait of 
Bruegel the man, for once more the emphasis 
is thrown upon that droll and amusing side 
of his nature which seems to have appealed 
most to his own circle and thence been trans- 
mitted to Van Mander. But that Bruegel 
was intensely aware of the tragedies about 
him is evident enough in his works. ‘The 


things he saw for himself are set down in 
such pictures as the Massacre of the Inno- 
cents, yet with such an all-sufhicing objective- 
ness that it requires an effort of mind to real- 
ize that that very convincingness comes from 
his having felt the tragic reality he records. 
But it is impossible to escape from the over- 


whelmingly personal quality of the thoughts 

set forth in the hell-mouth horrors of the 
Dulle Griet and the apocalyptic terors of the 

Triumph of Death. Moreover, Van Mander 

writes that Bruegel had made many other 

“inventions” which were ‘‘so satirical and 

mordant that on his death-bed he ordered 

them burnt by his wife, either from repen- — 
tance or from fear that his wife would get 

into trouble on account of them.” 

Not many months before this happened 


OdVud ‘CIYGVW ‘99ST YO $9ST ‘HLVAd AO HdWOINL AHL 


THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH (DETAIL) 


the people of the Low Countries commenced 
their final effort of revolt which was to estab- 
lish their freedom not until eleven years later. 
Bruegel left a world that was hardly less 
black than the death into which he descended 
with open eyes. At that very moment Mon- 
taigne was setting about to depict one entire 
man with a vision as veracious as that of 
Bruegel; Cervantes was soon to rival in 
words Bruegel’s power of making the fantas- 
tic real; and only forty years later Shakes- 
peare was to accomplish a re-creation of hu- 
man life that is more complete than Bruegel’s 
simply because the medium of literature itself 
permits a more comprehensive embodiment 
of the soul of man than is possible to the 
medium of paint. And the painter who more 
than any other kept close to life belongs in 
the company of these three. 


30 


A: 


HE subject-matter of Bruegel’s great 
fies is limited only by the world and 
life.* The whole cycle of nature is in them— 
the seasons as they pass over mountain, plain 
and moving waters; the dazzling beauty of 
the southern sea, the northern cold. The 
entire range of human life is in them; some- 
where in these multitudes every emotion finds 
its expressive gesture. Even all the animals 
that are intimately a part of human life are 
given in their degrees of individuality. These 
pictures seem to set before the eye every 
experience possible to man. 


Always a tale is being told, but always it 
is story-telling of a very definite kind. It is 


* The succeeding remarks upon Bruegel’s art and mind, disre- 
garding both the minor and the debatable works, are based 
specifically upon the paintings which are characteristically 
great. 


THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH (DETAIL) 


never a continuous narrative with a plot in- 
volving the same characters in different cir- 
cumstances. ‘hus Bruegel was never obliged 
to arrange successive episodes of the same 
story within one frame, as the older paint- 
ers had done. All the things that happen in 
his paintings could happen—do happen— 
just as he shows them, at the same time and 
in just the relationship to each other that he 
depicts. He always observes time unity and 
pulls together his wealth of episode and by- 
play through unity of theme. 

Butmon a given theme, at first,she at. 
tempted to say everything than can be said 
about it. The picture in Berlin illustrates 
seventy proverbs; the Children’s Games is 
said to contain every one of the one hundred 
and fifty-four varieties of play listed by Rab- 


31 


elais as the games of Gargantua; the Tower 
of Babel has been called a builders’ hand- 
book; the Massacre of the Innocents appar- 
ently depicts every possible attitude of par- 
ental grief and frenzy. ‘This exuberance of 
episode, this encyclopedic narrative utterance, 
had its literary counterpart in the book just 
mentioned; it was in full accord with the 
taste of the time, and Bruegel’s personal ap- 
titude had been fostered and disciplined by 
his long succession of drawings for the plates 
published by Cock. For the paintings of this 
type he has thought out every possible visual 
aspect of his story-matter and swept them all 
into a unity of design not less remarkable 
than his unity of theme. 

The astounding thing to be noted just here 
is the completeness with which such an exces- 


. 


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THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS (DETAIL) 


sive amount of anecdote is arranged into a 
functioning organism of narrative. In the 
Carrying of the Cross the movement of every 
one of the five hundred figures, the very ex- 
pression of every face, is determined by a 
completely organized story-action. All the 
figures, even the minutest ones, play their 
parts in the whole design as such; but their 
momentary relations as human beings, equal- 
ly complex, have been thought out and set 
down with equal thoroughness. Every epi- 
sode is a bar, every gesture a note, in Brue- 
gel’s orchestrated narrative. 


But other paintings show that Bruegel real- 
ized the fundamental weakness of this—the 
weakness of diversity. of visual motive, dis- 
traction from the pictorial whole. He ex- 
hibited a tendency towards the elimination of 
all side-play, towards the reduction of sub- 
ject-matter to a single motive and a reliance 


34 


upon emotional unity for the abiding impres- 
sion. His picture-making is still story-telling 
in that something happens in terms of human 
action; but it is a single and casual event, 
and the main interest is shifted from events 
to design and color as the expression of 
mood. In the Months he forgot all about 
narrative complexity for its own sake, fixed 
his attention on the pure pictorial beauty of 
people and of nature, and sought only the 
emotional meaning of his theme. | 


5. 


HE nature of Bruegel’s work previous to 

taking up painting is written at large and 

in detail over his early technical habits, but 

in these also can be traced a development cor- 

responding to the change just noted in sub- 
ject-matter. 

In the earlier pictures color in general is 


THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS (DETAIL) 


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VIENNA, MUSEUM 


1567. 


THE CONVERSION OF SAINT PAUL. 


THE WINE OF SAINT MARTIN (FRAGMENT). VIENNA, MUSEUM 


conceived somewhat as the worker in mosaic 
is compelled by his material to conceive it— 
as a weaving-together of brilliant bits of pure 
color into a color design which is itself 
thought out independently of other technical 
qualities. “Chere is harmony and richness, but 
there is not that melting tonality which after- 
wards came to be looked upon as the last 
word in painting. Above all else, there is an 
unbelievable brilliancy, especially where Brue- 
gel made a lavish use of vermilion. The chain 
of soldiers woven through the multitude in 
the Carrying of the Cross is one of the most 
daring things to be found in painting; but 


38 


for general sumptuousness 
of color approaching to the 
fusion of later times there 
is, outside of the Months, 
no equal in Bruegel’s work 
to the Conversion of Paul. 
And always it is color used 
for its own sake, with great 
sensuous delight. Yet al- 
ways, again excepting the 
Months, it is color laid on 
to form which has already 
been conceived as drawing; 
the color, superb in itself, 
follows the form superbly; 
but the color and the draw- 
ing exist independently of 
one another. 

At the beginning of his 
painting career it was his 
drawing especially which 
was determined by his work 
for the engravers. For the 
masculine style of engrav- 
ing that prevailed in his 
day the preparatory draw- 
ings had to show absolute 
precision of outline. The 
edges of everything had to 
be clean and unmistakable 
in order that the engraver 
might know what was in- 
tended; the artist of the 
first instance had to make it 
impossible for the engraver 
to mistake his meaning as to this contour or 
that shape. Drawing in this manner for 
years before he began to paint, Bruegel nec- 
essarily continued to do so afterwards. This 
accounts for the prevailingly silhouette char- 
acter of his multitudes of tiny figures. Often- 
times, even from the beginning, the form that 
meets the eye within the shape is substan- 
tially filled out without being accompanied 
by the feeling of all-aroundness; but a full 
three-dimensional quality is more and more 
often attained until in the Paul, again, it fills 
the picture to a degree elsewhere unequalled 
in Bruegel’s work. 


THE PARABLE OF THE BLIND MEN. 1568. NAPLES, NATIONAL MUSEUM 


THE LAND OF COCKAIGNE. 1567. BERLIN, VON KAUFFMANN COLLECTION 


+ 


THE, CRIPPLES 1568: 


But another consequence of his early 
professional training—and a _ consequence 
which enabled him to accomplish some of 
his most amazing feats—was his skill in 
composition. His training in draftsmanship 
gave him the power to render exactly all de- 
tails that contribute to individuality of char- 


acter, and the simultaneous training in compo- 


sition taught him how to arrange immense 
numbers of such individualized figures with- 
out loss of mass unity. Was it the Alpine 


mountain-sides or merely the upper window. 


of a house on a village square that suggested 
to him the device of a slightly elevated view- 
point? It is this more than anything else 
that enables him to impose upon his multi- 
tudes that order of art by which may be ex- 
pressed the disorder of life; and it is this 
that gives him his long perspectives of village 


PARIS, LOUVRE 


streets or far horizons dominated by oblique 
lines. These last, starkly visible at first and 
gradually becoming more broken and con- 
cealed, constitute the characteristic mark of 
Bruegel the designer. 

But it is in design that there is to be dis- 
cerned the least amount of technical advance 
on Bruegel’s part; what he learned before 
he began to paint seems to have come nearer 
to sufficing him in design than in drawing or 
in color. His composition scheme in the set 
of the Months is shockingly, though inten- 
tionally, repetitious; in the hands of a less 
vigorous artist it must quickly have become 
the deadest recipe. He divides his panel into 
two practically equal parts by a bold diagonal 
from one upper corner to the opposite lower 
one; one of these parts he fills with things 
and people seen close at hand, and the other 


40 


THE MAGPIE ON THE GALLOWS. 


with a far-spreading panorama. And he does 
it five times over with such freshness that 
doing it seven times more does not seem be- 
yond his powers. But the design remains a 
pattern, conceived in the same way as the 
large composite landscapes done soon after 
his return from Rome. 

In drawing and color, on the other hand, 
the Months show a marked departure from 
earlier habits in the direction of an essentially 
modern practice. In the drawing as such 
there is an increase in looseness with no loss 
of surety; tightness is sacrificed, but not pre- 
cision. ‘The figures are still silhouettes to a 
great extent, but there is an approach to the 
coalescence of color and drawing. In color 
by itself there is ever an opposition of large 
areas of some shade of brown and some 
shade of green, and a weaving of these areas 


41 


1568. DARMSTADT, MUSEUM 


together by bits of each color in the other 
and of other colors in both. Though there 
is never the full impressionistic fusing of 
edges in atmosphere, there is yet a decided 
approximation to the vision of a genuinely 
naturalistic landscape painter, as distingu- 
ished from the vision of a draftsman or a 
miniaturist. 

While this is true, and must be accounted 
to Bruegel as a merit, an evidence of mental 
and technical growth, it is still in a measure 
unfair to the never-failing largeness and unity 
of vision in the earlier work. Whether the 
other qualities of this work be regarded as 
merits or defects in themselves depends, of 
course, upon the technical tenets or prefer- 
ences of him who makes the judgment. But 
in Bruegel they were neither merits nor de- 
fects; they were characteristics which had to 


hs 


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gee 
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1568? VIENNA, MUSEUM 


WEDDING FEAST. 


be present in his pictures if he painted at all. 
They were necessitated by the time in which 
he lived and by his professional practice 
previous to painting. They were as much a 
part of him as his fondness for telling stor- 
ies; and in the fluctuations of taste stranger 
things have already happened than would be 
the return of even this latter element to pro- 
fessional as well as popular favor. 


6. 


N Bruegel’s time story-telling in pictures 
I generally was still one of the principal 
means of communicating ideas—even, per- 
haps mainly, ideas that were not inherently 
pictorial; prints were still the nearest things 
to books in popular circulation. Moreover, a 
nation living under the necessity of never 
speaking out openly on either politics or re- 


WEDDING FEAST (DETAIL) 


43 


ligion naturally resorted to symbol, the con- 
crete proverb or the image that said one 
thing and meant another. The print of the 
big and little fish not only meant that the 
great oppressed the small but carried an idea 
beyond the words of the proverb in showing 
the big fish ripped up and disgorging; and 
upon a people so apt at interpreting images 
the significance of that would not be lost. 
This people could not only take a hearty 
enjoyment of the good things of life but they 
could also face the whole of it without shrink- 
ing from any part of it, whether of gross- 
ness or of terror. For the latter, indeed, they 
even had a gusto and the former they 
laughed away with a saving healthiness. The 
distinguishing mark of their living and their 
thinking was a robust realism. 

In Pieter Bruegel there emerged from 


1568? VIENNA, MUSEUM 


PEASANT DANCE. 


PEASANT DANCE (DETAIL) 


among them a man of genius in complete 
sympathy with their realistic attitude to- 
wards life; knowing it from childhood, he 
gave it in his art a more complete expression 
than it had ever had before. The whole 
originality and fertility of his mind were for 
long expended upon feeding the popular taste 
not only for the familiar or exotic beauty 
of nature but also for a rough philosophy, 
unorganized but none the less genuine; and 
a habit so well established in him by years 
of labor would not vanish all at once even 
when more purely painter-like interests as- 
sumed for him a major importance. His 
predecessors in painting had been realistic in 
their measure; in them, however, realism 
was largely confined to details of execution 
and was more than counterbalanced by mark- 
edly idealistic conceptions. Even in the gro- 
tesqueries of Bosch the older disparity be- 


tween idea and embodiment existed; the dia- 
bolism in them was only the obverse of the 
conventional religious idealism, and its dis- 
tance from a true realism of content re- 
mained the same. When Bruegel came to 
painting, he both carried the manner of real- 
ism farther than his predecessors had done 
and informed that manner with its appropri- 
ately realistic matter, bringing about a new 
harmony between the body and the spirit of 
the art. He became the first complete realist 
in the history of painting. 

The Fall of the Rebel Angels is the near- 
est thing to a rule-proving exception among 
Bruegel’s great works, the single one which 
exhibits any of the older disparity between 
container and content; and this picture, great 
as it is, could vanish without impairing in 
the least Bruegel’s essential greatness. To 
examine the Berlin Proverbs in detail is to 


MARINE. VIENNA, MUSEUM 


FLEEING SHEPHERD. 


1569? 


get a feeling of being among mad folks be- 
cause so many of the sayings here illustrated 
turn upon outlandish actions; but as a picture 
it is a piece of masterly realistic sanity show- 
ing a whole village, in which some of the in- 
habitants happen to be crazy, intensely busy 
about its own affairs. The Triumph of 
Death, so far from being a piece of wild and 
gross fancy, is actually the lucid statement of 
an idea as true as any gesture in the picture; 
it is precisely the relentlessness of its realism 
in thought as well as in embodiment which 
frightens people into calling it untrue. The 
latter two paintings only show that if an 
artist is realist enough, if he penetrates suf- 
ficiently into the actual, he necessarily be- 
comes imaginative; they only reiterate and 
strengthen Bruegel’s right to be considered 
the supreme realist in painting. 

Part of his realism is his refusal to depict 


47 


PHILADELPHIA, JOHNSON COLLECTION 


what he did not feel. Only once did he ven- 
ture upon any of the religious emotionalism 
that had played so large a part in the work 
of his predecessors, and then he found the 
emotion so foreign to his own feelings that 
he openly borrowed the imagery of it; in re- 
lation to the great panoramic realism of the 
Carrying of the Cross, the group of mourn- 
ing women remains a mere formalism, dis- 
sociated in spirit and in manner from all 
about it. Jesus. himself is simply an unfor- 
tunate creature whose approaching execution 
is the pretext for this holiday. What passes 
for the conversion of Paul might be the delu- 
sion of a man knocked in the head on falling 
from a shying horse; there is about the event 
none of the conventional supernaturalism be- 
cause for Bruegel that sort of thing was not 
real. The religious subject as such disap- 
pears from his work; and this, coming after 


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VIENNA, MUSEUM 


DARK DAY (JANUARY?). 


DARK DAY (DETAIL) 


the ecstatic idealisms of his predecessors, 
amounts to the expression of an idea concern- 
ing the significance—or lack of it—1inherent 
in the churchly religion. He will have noth- 
ing to do with what is not human; not even 
nature enters into the great paintings except 
as a setting that enhances, by sympathy or 
contrast, the emotional life of human beings. 
To these, whom he knows and loves, Brue- 
gel gives himself wholly, to share in their 
sorrows and their joys. His religion is that 
of the great humanists in all ages, and his 
faith is given only to life itself. 

Part of his realism is the robust laughter 
which is the only solution for the fix in which 
human beings find themselves. It is the 
spirit that animated Rabelais in describing 


49 


the birth of his hero and Shakespeare in cre- 
ating Falstaff. To come closer home to 
Bruegel, perhaps, it is the spirit of Till Eu- 
lenspiegel, whose gross pleasanteries were 
probably relished by the painter along with 
the rest of his generation. Bruegel’s passion 
for completeness in his realism abolishes pri- 
vacy, and the state of aftairs brought to pass 
by this slicing away of all walls is saved only 
by humor. Humor is the safety-valve for a 
spirit resolute to probe life to its last refuge 
—to probe life, but not to break through 
by main force, as attempted by later realists 
so-called. 

Another element in Bruegel’s realism is the 
objectivity of his work. Van Mander’s anec- 
dote already quoted shows that Bruegel went 


VIENNA, MUSEUM 


HUNTERS IN THE SNOW (FEBRUARY ?). 


among the peasants, not as a protessional 
artist in search of material, but as a partici- 
pator in their life; and the great pictures 
themselves strikingly bear this out. ‘This is 
not to say that Bruegel never worked direct- 
ly from life, for there are many drawings 
which could not have been done otherwise— 
a team of horses resting, soldiers standing in 
the way, old market-women squatting beside 
their wares. But when he came to paint the 
great pictures, Bruegel worked from a mem- 
ory stocked with the gestures and actions of 
people who are unconscious of being watched. 
Bruegel’s mind was centered upon their life 
and he was concerned with technic hardly be- 
yond the point where it would enable him to 
crowd all their life into his given space and 
shape. His concentration upon the story he 
was telling, from the encyclopedic narrative 
of the early works to the simple and straight- 
forward emotionalism of the Months, put 
him on the crest of a wave of energy which 
carried him through many an undertaking 
that would have been impossible for a more 
self-conscious man. We who see the pictures 
now are unconscious of the painter because 
he was himself lost in his subject; and because 
of this, also, we are unconscious of ourselves. 
“No glance ever strays across the footlights 
to the audience,”’ wrote Meier-Graefe of Ho- 
garth’s scenes. In Bruegel’s work there are 
no actors, no footlights and no audience. 
There is only life and participation in life 
by painter and by us. 

And everywhere in these pictures it is the 
life of Bruegel’s own time. His predecessors 
had clothed religious themes in contemporary 
dress, but the outer and the inner remained 
separate things; Breugel, retaining the outer, 
put into it its own proper content. He oust- 
ed religious stories by contemporary stories. 
These he painted so completely that a thor- 
ough sociological knowledge of the age might 
be founded upon or tested by his pictures. 
The whole life of the time is set down by a 
hand that never falsifies, that swerves nei- 
ther to the right of idealization nor to the 
left of caricature. 

Yet to leave him as a painter of contempo- 
rary manners only would be almost as false 


51 


to his greatness as to consider him only as 
Bruegel the Droll. For he penetrates below 
the temporary appearances of his time to the 
permanent in human nature. His pictures 
can be a means of access to the life of his 
age, to be sure; but no lover of them would 
think of using them in this fashion. The im- 
portant thing is that they give access to a life 
that is of more than one age; under the cos- 
tume of the time exists the same humanity 
that now wears another dress. 

In giving himself over so unreservedly to 
the impermanent, Bruegel took what was for 
him the only way to the permanent. This 
cannot be captured by going out after a 
vague and unlocalized something called life 
in general; what is presented to the artist for 
his use is always life in particular. There is 
an all-life in the steady and swelling succes- 
sion of human generations; but the only 
means of access to that is the now-life. The 
great artist’s major accomplishment lies in 
revealing the universal through the particu- 
lar, the permanent through the transitory, 
the inevitable through the accidental. 

This Bruegel does; and how well he does it 
is to be found by analyzing the thought be- 
hind his varied rendering of events and peo- 
ple. Even in his early pictures each creature 
has his own individuality and yet is part of 
the crowd, which remains a crowd in spite of 
all detail; each individual retains his own 
value of personality and yet is integrated 
into a collective being. Bruegel’s minute ac- 
curacy of drawing expresses his love for the 
individual as such; his great masses of people 
express his desire to see life largely and as an 
interwoven whole. Moreover, the device of 
making the ostensible subject of a picture an 
almost invisible incident in it is an expression 
of an idea as to the relative importance of 
the individual and what happens to him. 
Though the actions of the Carrying of the 
Cross and the Conversion of Paul do actually 
center around the subject-incident, the inci- 
dent itself is reduced almost to the vanishing- 
point; so that the story emphasis is thrown 
entirely upon the larger life of which the in- 
cident is only the temporary focus. The 
Fall of Icarus likewise expresses this heresy 


3 
j 
4 
j 
: 


HUNTERS IN THE SNOW (DETAIL) 


HAYMAKING (JUNE?). RAUDNITZ, COLLECTION OF PRINCE LOBKOWITZ 


against conventional thinking as to what is 
truly sublime; only here the unimportance of 
a particular event is made more emphatic by 
such a detail as the position of the shepherd 
as well as by the large indifference of this 
great luminous calm expanse of land and sea 
and sky. 

Moreover, the sequence of changes in the 
relative importance of the human figures in 
the paintings is but the story of Bruegel’s 
developing conception of the relative import- 
ance of man in the scheme of things. In one 
group of pictures the individual, though fully 
personalized, is a part of the crowd and the 
crowd a mass of insects swarming over the 
landscape. In another group of large-fig- 
ured peasant subjects man is all-important, 
filling the whole and shutting nature out. The 
former are amazing, and one can hardly get 
too much of them; the latter are interesting 


a) 


and one likes them long. But for the final 
expression of his mind one must turn to the 
set of the Months; these five, with the addi- 
tion of the Paul and the Icarus, form the 
summit of Bruegel’s art. In them Bruegel 
reached the solution of the two problems of 
his life, the life of nature and the life of man; 
and the solution was the life of man in 
nature. 

The Months sum up his life’s endeavor 
both in the material he had all along been 
dealing with and in the conceptions between 
which all along he had been alternating. 
They are full of motives and incidents taken 
from his earlier works—the church he drew 
so often, children at their games, the great 
stretches of landscape that he loved. But all 
things are adjusted to one another in a new 
way; the people are seen neither too large 
nor too small, but in a perfect relationship to 


Luv dO WOAUSAW NV.LITOdOULAW “WHOA MAN ‘(¢LSNDAV) SYALSHTAUVH AHL 
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VIENNA, MUSEUM 


THE RETURN OF THE HERDS (NOVEMBER?). 


Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 


THE HARVESTERS (DETAIL) 


an immensely embracing nature; and each 
picture is pervaded by an unbroken harmony 
of mood. This set marks the attainment of 
final insight into everything that had con- 
cerned him; they constitute his acceptance 
and afhirmation of life. 


the 


HE more Bruegel’s work is studied the 

stronger grows the feeling that almost 
everything may be attributed to him. To go 
to Vienna and through that group of fifteen 
pictures to come into direct contact with his 
mind across three hundred and fifty years is 
to be convinced that his is one of the inex- 
haustible minds of the world. The material 
brilliancy of the painting is more than 
matched by the brilliancy of the creative soul 
behind them. Whether he himself was con- 
scious of all that can now be perceived in his 
work does not much matter; whether it came 
there with him aware or unaware, it is 
enough to make him superbly great. But this 
much is true: the more his mind is appre- 


56 


hended, the more vast and purposeful it 
appears. 
He was fortunate in finding his means of 
expression in what was then a popular art; 
everything about that art was so alive that it 
drew to itself some of the greatest minds of 
the time. There existed’ a tremendous 
amount of give-and-take between the artist 
and his age, and this degree of interaction 
it was which had most to do with endowing 
both art and artist with vitality; they were 
fed from sources outside of and larger than 
themselves. Thus it was that Bruegel attained 
to so comprehensive an expression of himself 
and his age together that his work has be- 
come one of the permanent things of art. 
Each picture is a completely functioning 
organism with several different aspects. 
There is the aspect of story-telling, that of 
technical picture-making and that of philoso- 
phic thought. Each aspect functions har- 
moniously with the others. Not only can 
one analyze out at will the elements proper 
to each aspect, but one can move from one to 


THE RETURN OF THE HERDS (DETAIL) 


another without any feeling of shifting gear 
or changing speed. (The one exception is 
the group of mourning women in the Carry- 
ing of the Cross.) All these aspects func- 
tion at the same mental rate. They are all 
interwoven into powerful wholes. Every 
picture is a world in itself, and coming to 
know them is one of the completest experi- 
ences that can be found anywhere in the art 
of painting. 

Yet even with this completeness of expres- 
sion attained, one has before Bruegel’s work 
a feeling of still more behind, an immensity 
of mind larger than any art can be. It is the 
feeling one has before Michel Angelo, but 
not before Raphael; before Shakespeare, but 
not before Marlowe. The greater ones are 
not only greater in their art, but they have 


something left over in themselves which their 
art suggests but does not directly express. 
Of this greater company is Pieter Bruegel. 

Theres are. purer (painters but for sta. 
purity of their art they pay the price of going 
without something of importance to a com- 
plete life. And even their gain in intensity 
seems hardly a gain in the face of Bruegel’s 
intensity on all the levels of his completeness. 
He transposes all life into his pictures in a 
scale of relative relationship that preserves 
the values of human life itself. Every other 
painter lacks something or has something in 
excess. Bruegel is the most comprehensive 
and the best balanced, the most energetic and 
the mellowest. Of all painters he is the 
greatest realist, and of them all the most 
humane. 


THE RETURN OF THE HERDS (DETAIL) 


58 


AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 


HE object of the following book-list is to 

mention not everything that has been printed 
about Pieter Bruegel but only such volumes and 
articles as have definite value. The major cause 
of its shortness, however, is the fact that the litera- 
ture of the subject is surprisingly small in quan- 
tity; in English, particularly, there is almost nothing 
beyond short paragraphs in some histories of art 
and the usual unilluminating brevities of general 
reference works. 


PIETER BRUEGEL L’ANCIEN. Son Oeuvre et son 
Temps. Par RENE VAN BASTELAER et GEORGES 
Huwin De Loo. Bruxelles: G. Van Oecst & 
Cie.: 1907. 


This, the first volume to be published on Bruegel, 
remains the standard work. For the handsomeness 
and completeness of its reproductions combined with 
the accuracy and thoroughness of its text, treating 
every aspect of the painter’s life and work, it is 
a notable accomplishment in book-making and in 
scholarship. What has since been written and the 
pictures that have since been discovered still do no 
more than supplement certain phases of it; nor can 
it be superseded until someone is prepared to give 
time and money to a thorough search of European 
galleries and private collections. It is now, how- 
ever, somewhat difficult to obtain. 


Les EsTaAMPEs DE PETER BRUEGEL L’ANCIEN. 
Par RENE VAN BaASTELAER. Bruxelles: G. Van 
Oest & Cie.: 1908. 


Within its chosen field this volume also remains 
the standard and needs only supplementing by later 
researches. Its 278 plates reproduce all the prints 
then thought to be by Bruegel or after his designs. 


PieERRE BRUEGEL L’ANCIEN. Par CHARLES BER- 
NARD. Bruxelles: G. Van Oest & Cie.: 1908. 


This, which appeared immediately after the two 
preceding volumes, may fairly be described as a good 
popularization of them, with additional historical 
material drawn from other sources. ‘The thirty 
reproductions are very good half-tones; the text 
gives a satisfactory account of the painter’s life and 
times, although there is too much reliance upon the 
mere subject-matter of the pictures and although 
parts of Van Mander’s clumsy narrative are trans- 
posed into French of debatable suavity. It is the 
only generally available biography in French.* To 
any reader of it my indebtedness to it for facts 
(other than those given by Van Mander) and my 


oe 


occasional difference of will be 


equally evident. 


interpretation 


Der BAUERN-BRUEGEL. Von W. HausENSTEIN. 
Miinchen & Leipzig: R. Piper & Co.: 1910. 


This is commended by Herr Friedlander (see 
eighth item) as a portrait of the man Bruegel; as a 
discussion of his work, however, it has been super- 
seded in German by Herr Friedlander’s own book. 


“THE ADORATION OF THE KINGs” By PIETER 
BRUEGHEL THE ELper. By C. J. Hotmes. In 
The Burlington Magazine; vol xxxviii, no. ccxv: 


London: February 1921. 


THE Harvesters sy PIETER BRUEGEL THE 
Exper. By B[ryson] B[urRroucus]. In The 
Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: 
vol. xvi, no. 5: New York: May 1921. 


The fact that these two articles ostensibly deal 
each with a single picture should not obscure either 
their general interest or their significance as indica- 
tions and instruments of the contemporary tendency 
to assign to Bruegel a higher rank than he has had 
heretofore. 


Von Eyck sis BRUEGEL. Studien zur Geschichte 
der Niederlandischen Malerei. Von Max J. 
FRIEDLANDER. Berlin: Julius Bard: 1921. (Of 
Bruegel: p. 169 to end). 


The main point of interest about Bruegel in this 
book is that the author gives a catalogue of paint- 
ings which differs considerably, both in its omissions 
and in its additions, from that given by M. Hulin 
(see first item). 


PIETER BRUEGEL. Von Max J. FRIEDLANDER. 
Berlin: Propylaen-Verlag: 1921. 


This is the standard general work in German, 
and contains a trustworthy translation of the entire 
text of Van Mander concerning Bruegel. Even 
those who do not read German might well possess 
this book for the clearness and frequent brilliancy 
of its 101 half-tone reproductions, the majority of 
which are from drawings and prints. Herr Fried- 
lander is the only continental scholar so far whose 
work takes cognizance of the picture now in the 
Metropolitan Museum. 


BrRuEGEL. Von Kurt PFistTEr. Leipzig: Insel- 


Verlag: 1921. 
This short essay merits notice as a piece of writ- 
ing. The 78 half-tone reproductions are not very 


clear, but they include more than a dozen which 
are in neither Friedlander nor Bernard. 


Pieter BruerGceL. Vierzehn Faksimiledrucke nach 
Zeichnungen und Aquarellen. Mit einer Ein- 
leitung von Kurt Prister. Miinchen: R. Piper 
i Wossloc: 


‘This handsome series of large plates is a publica- 
tion of the Marées-Gesellschaft and for faithfulness 
in facsimile reproduction is not to be surpassed. 


PIETER BRUEGHEL’s “FALL OF ICARUS” IN THE 
BrussELs Museum. By ARTHUR EDWIN BYE. 
In Art Studies: Medieval Renaissance and Mod- 


ern: No. 1. Princeton: University Press: 1923. 


A sympathetic though not stylistically distin- 
guished essay in appreciation, written around the 
Fall of Icarus in the Brussels Museum. 


RENAISSANCE ART. By ELIE FAuRE. New York: 
Harper & Brothers: 1923. (Of Bruegel: pp. 
276-286). 

This author’s habitual saturation with his subject- 
matter has enabled him to convey the multitudinous 
quality to be felt in many of Bruegel’s pictures and 
also to adumbrate the humanity of soul behind 
them; but he has almost nothing to say about the 
more narrowly esthetic merits which permit of 
Bruegel being ranked among the great; and even 
on the score of subject-matter Bruegel’s livingness 
is almost smothered under a rhetoric made sluggish 
with anecdotal detail. 


BREUGHEL. By ALtpous Huxtey. In The Calen- 
dar of Modern Letters: vol. 1, no. 6: London: 
August 1925. 


This essay is a little sermon on the virtue of com- 
prehensiveness in the appreciation of art, with Brue- 
gel as an ideal text. It is not itself a comprehensive 
presentation of the painter or his work and it has 
very few traces of the verbal brilliancy which has 
had so much to do with putting this author’s novels 
in the best-selling class; but it may make the name 
of Bruegel known to many who are not in a posi- 
tion to penetrate his work on their own account. 
I note a curious slip in the transposition of titles 
between the Brussels Numbering at Bethlehem and 
the Vienna Massacre of the Innocents. 


Diz ZEICHNUNGEN PIETER BRUEGELS. Von 
Kart Tounat. Miinchen: R. Piper & Co.: 
1925. 


This book has immediately taken rank as the 


60 


standard authority on the drawings; its 104 large 
half-tone plates reproduce every drawing listed in its 
catalogue. 


PIETER BRUEGEL DER AELTERE. Siebenunddreissig 
Farbenlichtdrucke nach seinen Hauptwerken in 
Wien und eine Einfiihrung in seine Kunst. Von 
Max DvorAx. Wien: Oesterreichischen Staats- 
druckerei. 


This wonderful production is just being com- 
pleted ; its magnificent plates embody the utmost re- 
sources of modern color-printing. An edition with 
the text translated into French is announced for the 
month of July, and another with a translation into 
English is expected during the year. 


The foregoing annotations are based upon actual 
reading and examination of the books and articles 
mentioned. I think it well to append a few addi- 
tional items which I have had no opportunity as yet 
to examine; my study of the volumes already listed, 
however, leads me to believe that they possess inter- 
est and importance. “The words in italics at the end 
of each entry indicate its source among the books 
in the previous section. 


PrerRE BrueGHeL Le Viseux. Par HEwnrRI 
Hymans. (Gazette des Beaux-Arts: Paris: 
1890 et 1891.) Pfister: Bibliography. 

Les BRUEGHEL. Par Emite MicHEt. Paris: 
1892. Van Bastelaer & Hulin, p. 294. 

PieTER BRUEGHEL DER AELTERE UND SEIN 


KUNSTSCHAFFEN. Von ALEex L. ROMDAHL. 
(Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen 
des Allerhéchsten Kaiserhauses, Bd. 25: Wien: 
1905.) Tolnai and Pfister: Bibliographies. 


PreTeR BRUEGEL IM KUPFERSTICHKABINETT ZU 
Bertin. Von Lupwic BurcHarp. (Amtliche 
Berichte aus der Konigliche Kunstsammlung in 
Berlin, Bd. 34: Berlin: 1912-13.) Tolnai: 
Bibliography. 


Die NIEDERLANDISCHE LANDSCHAFTSMALEREI VON 
PATINIR BIS BRUEGEL. Von LUDWIG VON 
Baupass. (Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen 
Sammlungen des Allerhéchsten Kaiserhauses, Bd. 


34: Wien: 1918.) Tolnai: Bibliography. 


Der BAUERN-BRUEGEL UND DAS DEUTSCHE 
SPRICH WORT. Von WILHELM  FRAENGER. 
(Miinchen: 1923.) Tolnai: Bibliography. 


NOTES 


HE illustrations of Bruegel’s paintings accom- 

panying this article are confined to those 
accepted as authentic by M. Hulin in his catalogue 
(see Bibliography, first item), with certain addi- 
tional ones discovered since its publication. Seven- 
teen of the paintings are positively dated; the rest 
must be distributed through the eleven years of 
painting on other evidence. Wherever a date ap- 
pears under an illustration, it is the one assigned 
by the authority just mentioned, with the excep- 
tions noted. ‘The only alteration in the chrono- 
logical order, so far as that may be determined, 
has been the grouping of the Months at the end, 
to correspond with the text, in which they are 
treated as the summing-up of Bruegel’s work as a 
painter. All the drawings reproduced are dated on 
the authority of Herr Tolnai (see Bibliography, 
fourteenth item). The following paragraphs 
give certain supplementary facts: 


Village Marriage: ‘Two copies by Pieter II are 
known. A comparison of this picture with them 
shows that the arm and hand of the man kneel- 
ing near the bottom of the stairway have been re- 


9] 


painted “for reasons of decency”’! 

Dancing Peasant: This is doubtful. Herr Fried- 
lander considers it a copy; M. Hulin leaves the 
matter undetermined, but reproduces it. 

Descent of Christ into Limbo (drawing): Herr 
Tolnai says that the date and signature are apo- 
cryphal, but assigns it to no other year. 

Flemish Proverbs: Not known to M. Hulin; 
date given on the authority of Herr Friedlander. 

Battle Between the Israelites and the Philistines: 
also called The Death of Saul at the Battle of 
Gilboa. The uncertainty of this date turns upon 
whether an extra figure can or can not be discerned 
at the end of the Roman numerals. 

Dulle Griet: The literal subject is the quarrel- 
some woman, Terrible Margaret, she who frightens 


the devil himself. 


The Carrying of the Cross: Also called The 
Road to Calvary. 


The Misanthrope: Also called The Perfidy of the 
World. ‘The proverb lettered at the bottom is 


Om dat de vverelt is soe ongetru 
Daer om gha ic in den ru. 


The translation is: Since the world is so untrust- 
worthy, I go in mourning. 


The Proverb of the Bird-Nester: The proverb is 


61 


Dije den nest vveet dije vveeten: 
Dije rooft, dije heeten. 


It may be translated: Who knows where the nest 
is has his knowledge; who rifles it has possession. 

The Numbering at Bethlehem: Also called The 
Payment of Tithes. 

The Fall of Icarus: Not catalogued by M. 
Hulin. Here put next to the Paul in order to 
follow the text, in which these two are joined with 
the Months as representing the height of Bruegel’s 
achievement. 

The Wine of Saint Martin: Admitted by M. 
Hulin, but with strong doubts; regarded as the 
fragment of a larger work; done originally in 
tempera and repainted in oil, perhaps in the seven- 
teenth century. 

The Magpie on the Gallows: This picture was 
bequeathed by Bruegel to his wife. 

Marine: Not dated by M. Hulin. Placed here 
because it appears to be unfinished, and so possibly 
very late. 

The Months: The months suggested in the titles 
given under the illustrations follow M. Hulin’s 
catalogue. Herr Friedlander assigns that given as 
January to March, the February to December, the 
August (New York) to July, leaving the other two 
as given. 

M. Hulin dates the whole set about 1567. The 
only trace among them of a date is on the picture 
in the Metropolitan Museum; on the strength of 
this Herr Friedlander assigns it positively to 1565, 
but Mr. Burroughs is inclined to agree with M. 
Hulin. In any case the violation of time order in 
placing this set last is not very great and the gain 
is considerable in giving a culminating impression 
of Bruegel’s art. 

he 

No paintings in Bruegel’s manner are reproduced 
which are definitely or even probably by the sons. 
They are a multitude in themselves, and are mostly 
attributed to the father. ‘They are to be met with 
everywhere, from London to Palermo, from Mad- 
rid to Petrograd. Herr Friedlander authenticates 
(without reproducing) one in Budapest and another 
in Csakany. In Hampton Court Palace there is an 
extremely interesting smaller version of the Vienna 
Massacre of the Innocents in which eatables are 
substituted for most of the children, and a com- 
panion piece of coarser workmanship giving an 
entirely different picture of a massacre. In Vienna 
there are a dozen or more by the sons which throw 


much light on the entire question of Bruegel’s own 
pictures; the most interesting of these is in the 
Lichtenstein Collection and is in the manner of the 
Fleeing Shepherd in Philadelphia. The problems 
raised by all these pictures are many and complex, 
but the scope and intention of this essay did not 
permit of its touching upon such matters. How- 


ever, there are all sorts of ways to spend life, and 


62 


not the least interesting way would be to go 
a-Bruegeling through Europe. 


ERRATUM: On page 33 the date of the Massacre 
of the Innocents should read 1566(?) instead of 
1556182) 

The Land of Cockaigne, reproduced on page 39, 
is now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. 


gan 


THE FALL OF ICARUS (DETAIL) 


VIENNA, ALBERTINA 


-61, 


ABOUT 1560 


) 


DRAWING 


MASTER AND PUPIL ( 


63 


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